Memories

A Thank-You Note to Pete Seeger

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1996, in my then-job of assistant editor at a weekly newspaper, I awarded myself the title of music reviewer for a single issue and attended a concert given at a local high school by Pete Seeger, who died two years ago today at age 94. (Our newspaper’s actual music reviewer was only interested in attending and writing about rock concerts. That was a stroke of luck for me.) I wrote a review, knowing full well that a review is not what one writes regarding a Pete Seeger concert. An appreciation. A thank-you note. But not a mere review judging aesthetic merits.

It was a great concert, by the way.
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Talk the Walk

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You should be on the radio,” was what was said. What was heard by my 16-year-old ego was, “You shouldn’t be on TV.”

The compliment was first given to me when I was a kid, when my voice suddenly and without the typical teenager’s pitch shifts and volume wobbles—the “Peter’s voice is changing, this week on a very special episode of ‘The Brady Bunch'”-type changes—deepened and thickened to its present baritone/bass.
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Teach Your Children

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I taught freshman composition at two upstate New York colleges in the early 1990s for five years. My last class met for its final session at the conclusion of the fall 1995 semester, just over two decades ago now.

From the start of that school term, 20 autumns ago, I knew that this was going to be my last semester teaching or attempting to teach or even correctly referring to myself as a “teacher”; thus, of course, two of the three classes that semester were two of the best groups of students I had yet worked with, and they almost made me regret my decision to retire at age 27. Almost.

The decision never was mine to make, however; I was not a good teacher, and I am grateful that I learned this on the sooner side of “sooner or later.” I am, perhaps, an entertaining lecturer but I am an even better student; as a 20-something freshman composition instructor, I must have been execrable. It’s too bad that I had barely made even the faintest start in what eventually became my pose as a long-suffering anything by the time it was all over.
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